The Crime
The boy's body, wrapped in a plaid blanket, was inside a cardboard box that once contained a baby's bassinet from J.C. Penney. The body was first found by a young man checking his muskrat traps. Fearing that the police would confiscate his traps, he did not report the matter. A few days later, a college student spotted a rabbit running into the underbrush. Knowing there were animal traps in the area, he stopped his car to investigate and discovered the body. He too was reluctant to have any contact with the police, but did report his find the following day.
The case attracted massive media attention in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, with pictures of the boy even being placed in every gas bill in Philadelphia. However, despite the huge publicity at the time and sporadic re-interest throughout the years, the case remains unsolved to this day, and the boy's identity is still unknown.
The story has been profiled on the television series America's Most Wanted. The television series Cold Case, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Law & Order: SVU have all used fictionalized accounts of the story as the basis for episodes.
Read more about this topic: Boy In The Box (Philadelphia)
Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.”
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